Color me surprised. I knew that Linux, while still only a niche player on the desktop, was continuing to do well on the server and was doing even better than ever on the cloud. What I hadn’t realized was just how much better Linux, and in particular, Canonical’s Ubuntu, was doing on in the market place.
Before I’d seen The Cloud Market’s analysis of operating systems on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), off the cuff I would have guessed the leading operating system on the top cloud platform would have been Red Hat and its close relatives, CentOS, Oracle Enterprise Linux, and Fedora. Boy was I wrong.
Today, December 20th, Ubuntu is running 4,840 instances on EC2, followed by CentOS, with 1,250, Fedora with 313; Oracle with 80; and Red Hat with a mere 73 instances. That’s a grand total of 1,716 for the Red Hat family, which means that Ubuntu is doing more than twice as well as all the Red Hat variants put together.
Windows and Azure? They’re back in the back with a mere 1,120 instances.